A student with his car in the race. Photo courtesy of the ASU

HCM CITY — More than 100 students from universities across Việt Nam took part in the final competition of the BUILD-IT AWS DeepRacer League - an autonomous racing league driven by machine learning held in HCM City on Tuesday.

The event was co-organised by the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) Building University-Industry Learning and Development through Innovation and Technology (BUILD-IT) Alliance, implemented by Arizona State University, and Amazon Web Services.

The DeepRacer is AWS’ latest machine learning tool. With the DeepRacer, students can tweak algorithms to train the autonomous car to identify and eventually follow a racetrack. As the DeepRacer cautiously meanders around the track, it gradually learns to identify the track and confidently sped along. The students are awestruck to see the DeepRacer learn by trial and error to complete a full circuit independently.

In the final race, ten top students whose models were selected competed for the final prize.

The 10 finalists had to design their own vehicle control model based on available hardware. The models will have to take advantage of the camera and sensor system to easily navigate the road and achieve the highest speed.

Nguyễn Đăng Khoa from HCM City University of Technology was named as the champion of the grand prix.

Khoa’s car model was assessed by the panel and audience to be the most beautiful and have tightest turning radius.

“I designed the car model to make it able to calculate the cornering angles so that the car can choose the most balanced corners, especially consecutive turns,” he said.

The ultimate goal of the BUILD-IT AWS DeepRacer League was to give student developers a unique opportunity to get started with reinforcement learning (RL) - an advanced machine learning (ML) technique that takes a very different approach to training models than other machine learning methods - to meet fellow machine learning enthusiasts, online and in person, and to network with world-class solution architects from AWS. Students were not required to have a technical background to participate in the league, as AWS Educate’s Machine Learning provided a fun and easy yet comprehensive learning experience for all those who are interested in machine learning.

By modernising technology and engineering higher education in Vietnamese universities, the BUILD-IT Alliance is helping Vietnamese universities produce graduates with the skills that Việt Nam's increasingly sophisticated economy demands. BUILD-IT leverages diverse government, industry, and academic partners to directly link higher education to the needs of the private sector. The Alliance builds strategic leadership skills to help the university's own leaders advance university autonomy, improve program and instructional quality, and form lasting partnerships with the private sector. BUILD-IT supports women's participation in technology and engineering programs through leadership forums, academic initiatives, and scholarships. VNS